NGSL全称New General Service List，是一个包含了2800多个单词的词汇表，这些单词是从大量语料中统计出来的最常用词汇，几乎涵盖了日常使用中90%以上的用词。配合 NGSL-S（NGS-SPOKEN 700词）、TSL (TOEIC Service List 1200词)、NAWL(New Academic Word List 960词)、BSL(Business Service List 1700词)四大词表，高度涵盖各领域重点单词，是英语学习者学习词汇的重要工具。
The ListS:
New General Service List 1.01 (NGSL): Celebrating 60 years of Vocabulary Learning:
In 1953, Michael West published a remarkable list of several thousand important vocabulary words known as the General Service List (GSL). Based on more than two decades of pre-computer corpus research, input from other famous early 20th century researchers such as Harold Palmer, and several vocabulary conferences sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation in the 30s, the GSL was designed to be more than simply a list of high frequency words, its primary purpose was to combine both objective and subjective criteria to come up with a list of words that would be of “general service” to learners of English as a foreign language. However, as useful and helpful as this list has been to us over the decades, it has also been criticized for (1) being based on a corpus that is considered to be quite dated, (2) being too small by modern standards (the initial work on the GSL was based on a 2.5 million word corpus that was collected under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1938), and (3) for not clearly defining what constitutes a “word”.
In March of 2013, on the 60th anniversary of West’s publication of the GSL, my colleagues (Dr. Brent Culligan & Joseph Phillips of Aoyama Gakuin Women’s Junior College) and I (Dr. Charles Browne, Meiji Gakuin University) announced the creation of a New General Service List (NGSL), one that is based on a carefully selected 273 million-word subsection of the 2 billion word Cambridge English Corpus (CEC) .
Although the NGSL was designed to help learners attain the highest possible coverage of general English with the fewest possible words, an important pedagogic question to consider is once these 2800 words are mastered, what words should learners study next?
While continuing to study the next most frequency general English words beyond the NGSL seems a logical next step, two issues which the learner faces are (1) the number of words they need to learn to make an additional 1% coverage gain increases sharply after 92%, and (2) depending on the student's specialization, it is very likely that they will make significantly faster gains by learning special purpose vocabulary.
To that end, we have created 3 additional special purpose vocabulary lists that fit together perfectly with the NGSL (i.e. no overlap or repeating words), the first is the New Academic Word List 1.0 (NAWL), the second is the TOEIC Service List 1.1 (TSL) and the third is the Business Service List 1.0 (BSL). We have also created a list of high frequency word of spoken English known as the NGSL-S (because it is a subset of the NGSL corpus). Each offers extremely good coverage within that specific domain and may be a useful next step for students with that goal. The efficiency of these lists can be seen the chart below which gives a rough estimate of coverage figures for each vocabulary list as well as the how the size of these lists compare with the overall vocabulary size of native speakers of English as well as the English language as a whole:
